Subject: J6) What are some important dates in the history
of hurricanes and hurricane research ?

Contributed by Neal Dorst (HRD)

Hurricane Timeline

1494 During his second voyage, Christopher Columbus shelters his fleet from
a tropical cyclone. This is the first written European account of a hurricane.

1502 During his fourth voyage Columbus warns the governor of Santo Domingo
of an approaching hurricane, but is ignored. A Spanish treasure fleet sets
sail and loses 20 ships with 500 men.

1565 A French fleet sent to support Ft. Caroline is devastated by a hurricane.
The Spaniards at St. Augustine massacre the colonists at Ft. Caroline
ensuring Spanish control of East Florida.

1609
The British ship Sea Venture is damaged by a hurricane but manages
to find refuge on uninhabited Bermuda archipelago. The islands become a British colony.

1635 The Great Colonial Hurricane strikes the young Massachusetts Bay and
Plymouth colonies.

1667 The Dreadful Hurricane strikes the Virginia colonies.

1702 A severe storm (possibly a hurricane) strikes England.
Daniel Defoe gathers eyewitness accounts and publishes them in
"The Storm".

1743 A hurricane prevents Ben Franklin from observing a lunar eclipse in
Philadelphia. When he later learns his brother in Boston experienced
the storm much later, he surmises that hurricanes don't move in the
direction that the winds are blowing. Also, Professor Winthrop of Harvard
makes first pressure and tide observations during this hurricane.

1780 The Great Hurricane leaves over 22,000 dead across the Antilles.

1815 Professor Farrar of Harvard observes winds as a hurricane,
known as the 'Great September Gale', passes Boston and concludes that the storm is a large, moving vortex.

1821 William Redfield observes counter-clockwise pattern
to damage across Connecticut following a hurricane.

A major hurricane strikes Barbados. Lt. Col William Reid of the Royal
Engineers is sent to survey the damage.

1837
Racer's Hurricane devastates much of the Gulf coast.

1838
Reid publishes his "Law of Storms" which advises mariners on how
to avoid a hurricane at sea.

1847
Reid establishes a hurricane warning network in Barbados.

1848
The Smithsonian Museum organizes a network of weather observers
across the United States and its territories.

1855
Andres Poey publishes a chronology of over 400 hurricanes since
the time of Columbus.

1856
A hurricane wipes out the resort on Last Island, Louisiana.

1865
Manila Observatory is founded in the Philippines with Fr. Faura
as its first director. Begins study of typhoons and creates an observing
network.

1870
Fr. Benito Viñes becomes head of Meteorological Observatory at
Belen College in Havana, and begins research on hurricanes. He
establishes an observing network across Cuba.

The United States Government forms its National Weather Service
under Army's Signal Service.

1873
The National Weather Service issues its first hurricane warning.

1875
Viñes issues his first hurricane warning.

1877
Viñes publishes "Relative Points of the Hurricanes of
the Antilles in September and October of 1875 and 1876", in
which he details using waves and cloud motions to forecast
hurricanes.

1879
Faura makes first typhoon forecast.

1890
U.S. Weather Bureau established from Army's National
Weather Service. Made a civilian agency under the
Department of Agriculture.

1893
The dealiest hurricane year in U.S. history, as the "Sea
Islands" hurricane kills 1000 to 2000 people, the "Chenier
Caminada" hurricane causes about 2000 deaths, and another
major hurricane strikes the Carolinas in mid-October.

1906
Cuba establishes its National Observatory under its Navy. Assumes
hurricane warning duties from Belen Observatory.

1909
Grand Isle, LA is struck by a major hurricane, killing 350 people.

1910
Cyclone of the Five Days ravages western Cuba twice. At first Belen scientists believe it to be two seperate hurricanes, but Jose Carlos Millas theorizes it was the same storm looping in the Yucatan Channel.

The Great Miami hurricane crashes into Florida causing tremendous
damage and a month later another hurricane strikes Havana causing
over 600 casualties.

1928
The Lake Okeechobee hurricane kills nearly 2500 people.
Also known as the 'San Felipe' hurricane in Puerto Rico
where it killed over 300 people.

1935
The Weather Bureau revamps its hurricane warning service, and divides
responsibilities between New Orleans, Jacksonville, San Juan, and
Washington, DC. Boston is added later.

The Labor Day hurricane hits the Florida Keys with over 400 killed. This
is the most intense hurricane to have been recorded in the U.S..

1938
The New England hurricane strikes Long Island and Rhode Island
causing over 600 deaths.

Ivan Tannehill publishes "Hurricanes, Their Nature and History".

1939
Fr. Deppermann publishes "Some Characteristics of Philippine Typhoons"
in which he presents a theoretical model of tropical cyclones.

1940
Gordon Dunn demonstrates that most Atlantic hurricanes form from
tropical easterly waves rather than baroclinic zones.

1943
The Weather Bureau's Jacksonville hurricane warning center is moved
to Miami where a joint center with the Navy and Air Corps is
established.

Major Joseph Duckworth flies his AT-6 trainer airplane into a hurricane
over Texas proving the utility of this method of reconnaissance.

1944
The Great Atlantic hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard and
causes 390 casualties, mostly at sea. This is the first hurricane with
scheduled aircraft reconnaissance and the first radar depiction of a
hurricane eye and spiral rainbands.

Major Harry Wexler and Lloyd Woods fly into Great Atlantic
hurricane and find that updrafts are confined to a small area
near the eye.

Herbert Riehl and Major Robert Shafer find that large vertical wind
shear is inimical to tropical cyclone formation and development.

Halsey's Third Fleet runs into Typhoon Cobra in the Pacific
with the loss of 3 destroyers and 790 men.

1945
The Navy and Air Force begin identifying typhoons by women's names.

Pacific fleet has another disasterous run in this time with Typhoon
Viper.

Major hurricane strikes Miami and travels up Florida peninsula.
Lt. Robert Atlas makes time lapse movie of Army radar scope as storm
approaches Orlando.

1946
The Navy and Air Force organize Hurricane Hunter squadrons in the
Atlantic and Typhoon Trackers and Typhoon Chasers in the Pacific.

1947
Navy planes seed an Atlantic hurricane as part of Project Cirrus.

Bob Simpson 'piggybacks' a research mission onto an Air Force
reconnaissance flight into a hurricane. This is the first detailed
examination of the upper level circulation of the hurricane core.

1947-1948
Four hurricanes over two years strike South Florida causing persistent
flooding. This leads to the formation of the South Florida Water
Management District.

1948
Eric Palmen publishes a study showing that hurricanes require at least
80 F (26 C) water in order to form. Same study attempts to map out
vertical structure of a hurricane from balloon soundings.

1970
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is formed,
unifying many government oceanographic facilities and ESSA, including
US Weather Bureau, which is renamed National Weather Service.

Hurricane Alicia forms from an old frontal boundary in the Gulf of
Mexico and hits Galveston and Houston.

1984
William Gray and his Colorado State team issue the first hurricane
seasonal forecast.

1985
Willoughby, Bob Black, Stan Rosenthal, and Dave Jorgensen write
an assessment of Project STORMFURY which documents several flaws in
the assumptions in planning the experiments that call the results into
question.

Hurricane Gloria roars up the eastern seaboard threatening New York
City, but eventually makes landfall on Long Island.

1987
The Air Force disbands its Pacific Typhoon Chasers squadrons.

1988
Hurricane Gilbert has the lowest central pressure to date (888 mb)
ever estimated for an Atlantic hurricane just before striking the
Yucatan peninsula.

1995
In one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons in decades, Hurricane
Opal rapidly intensifies as it approaches the Florida panhandle, only to
weaken just before landfall. It still causes $3 billion in damage.

Four hurricanes, Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne, strike Florida
in one year, setting a new record.

After Hurricane Ivan's landfall in the Florida panhandle, its remanents
moved over the Atlantic, looped back across Florida into the Gulf of
Mexico, reformed into a Tropical Storm, making landfall in Louisiana.

2005
In one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, 28 named
storms form, 15 of them hurricanes, seven of which are major, and
four reach Category Five status. For the first time the alternate
Greek alphabet scheme for naming storms has to be employed.

NASA's Tropical Cloud Systems and Processes Mission is set to
investigate eastern Pacific disturbances, but is diverted to
examining the activity in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

Hurricane Dennis becomes the earliest major hurricane to form in
the Atlantic.

Project IFEX examines transmitting detailed information in the
hurricane inner core in real-time to National Center for
Enivronmental Prediction for inclusion in intensity models.

An Aerosonde is flown into Tropical Storm Ophelia, the first such
unmanned vehicle penetration of a tropical cyclone.

2006
African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses (AMMA) experiment
examines the wind regimes over western Africa and their role
in generating disturbances over the Atlantic.

The NASA African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses (NAMMA) experiment
similarly seeks to investigate these disturbances off the African
coast using aircraft and the CALIPSO satellite. These systems
were then handed off to NOAA IFEX scientists over the western Atlantic.

2007
Hurricane Dean hits northern Belize as a Catagory Five storm.

Hurricane Felix repidly intensifies in the Caribbean and smashes
into northern Nicaragua at Category Five strength. This was the
first time on record that two Category Five hurricanes made landfall
during the same Atlantic hurricane season.

Humberto reaches hurricane strength just before making landfall
in northern Texas and only eleven hours after being named a
tropical storm.

An Aerosonde is flown into hurricane force winds for the first
time into Noel off the Carolinas.

2008
Hurricane Ike brings destruction to Cuba making landfall on
both the eastern and western ends of the island. It crosses
the Gulf of Mexico and then hits Galveston and scours the
Bolivar peninsula, causing over 100 deaths.

Hurricane Paloma's rapid intensification is recorded by a
series of NOAA scientific flights before its landfall in Cuba.

2009
One of the quietest Atlantic hurricane season is some time is
matched by minimal typhoon activity in the western Pacific.

NASA runs its Genesis and Rapid Intesification Program(GRIP) experiment
in conjunction with NOAA's IFEX field program along with a National
Science Foundation funded Pre-Depression Investigation of Cloud-Systems
in the Tropics (PREDICT). Using a fleet of aircraft platforms the
joint effort documents Hurricane Earl from formation through Rapid
Intensification to decay.

2011
Hurricane Irene makes landfall at New York City as a tropical
storm, yet causes over $16 billion damage mostly due to inland
flooding throughout New England.

2012
Hurricane Sandy ravages eastern Cuba and eventually strikes the
Jersey shore as a hybrid system, causing more than $75 billion
in damage, making it the second costliest Atlantic storm on record.

2013
Despite pre-season forecasts for an active hurricane season this
year sees the fewest Atlantic hurricanes since 1982.